Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle

Posted Aug 6, 2016 15:41 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle by mathstuf
Parent article: Statistics from the 4.7 development cycle

Given the direction that GCC and LLVM/Clang are taking, I am happy that the Linux kernel accepts fewer academic contributions. "Optimizations" based on unrealistic assumptions are an interesting academic curiosity, but should never become the default in production compilers.

As for the Linux kernel, other postings have given the reasons; or in other words, there is a gap between where a research projects ends and a piece of code is good enough for inclusion in the kernel. How big is that gap? Philipp Reisner finished his Diplomarbeit (~master's thesis) on DRBD in 2000, then continued working on it commercially (forming a company along the way), and DRBD was finally accepted into the Linux kernel in 2009; I am sure this did not count as academic contribution at that time, and given that many more years had been spent commercially on it than acedemically, counting it as academic would have been wrong.